Read Online Captain Corelli's mandolin by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online

no one, and could entertain us by mimicking the cockerel antics of the Duce and the antic Prussianisms of Adolf Hitler. He could reproduce the gestures and intonations of Visconti Prasca and deliver absurd speeches in the Prasca manner, full of extravagant optimism, wild plans, and obsequious references to the hierarchy. Everybody loved him, he never got promotion, and nor did he care. He adopted a wild mouse and called it Mario; part of the time it lived in his pocket, but when we were on route marches we used to see it poking its whiskers out of the top of his backpack and washing its face. It used to eat the peel of fruit and vegetables and was annoyingly fond of leather. I still have a little round hole at the top of one of my boots.
    We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately. Albania was a sort of holiday camp without any amenities, and we assumed that these orders had the sole purpose of attempting to keep us busy and were of no serious import.
    However, it seems clear in retrospect that an invasion of Greece must have been the ultimate intention; there were clues everywhere, if only we had seen them. In the first place there was all that propaganda about the Mediterranean being the `Mare Nostrum' and the fact that all our road-building, which was supposedly for the benefit of the Albanians, produced nothing but highways towards the Greek border. In the second place the troops started singing battle songs of unknown provenance and anonymous composer-ship, with words like `We'll go to the Aegean Sea, we'll seize Piraeus, and if things go right we'll have Athens too: We used to curse the Greeks for sheltering the ruritanian King Zog, and the newspapers were always full of alleged British attacks on our shipping from Greek waters. I say 'alleged' because nowadays I don't believe they really happened. I have a friend in the Navy who told me that as far as he knew none of our ships had been lost.
    I also don't believe any more that story that the Greeks killed Daut Haggia. I think that we did it and tried to blame it on the Greeks. This is a terrible thing for me to say because it shows how much I have lost my patriotic faith, but the fact is that I now know the Greek version of the events, which I got from Dottor Iannis when I went to see him about a bad toenail. It turns out that the man Hoggia was not an Albanian irredentist patriot at all. He had been convicted over twenty years of the murder of five Muslims, cattle-theft, brigandage, extortion, attempted murder, demanding money with menaces, carrying forbidden weapons, and rape. And this is the man that they tried to fool us into thinking of as a martyr. We were never told that the Creeks had arrested two Albanians for this man's murder, and were waiting for an extradition request. In any case I wonder now how the entire Italian nation could have been so naive, and I wonder why we were supposed to be so concerned about the Albanians when we had just taken their country and it had become obvious to all of us that they were only interested in murdering each other. The two men who murdered the `patriot' Hoggia apparently poisoned him and then cut off his head, which is mild indeed by Albanian standards.
    A great many things caused me to lose faith, and I commit to paper here an account involving Francesco and myself which demonstrates clearly that it was our side that started the war, and not the Greeks. If we win the war these facts will never come to light, I know, because these papers will be suppressed. But if we lose there may be a chance that the world will learn the truth.
    It is hard enough to live at peace with yourself when you are a sexual outsider, but it is even harder when you know that in the line of duty you have carried out the most abominable